The question asked by twenty-seven students in Port Vila has been answered. On the 23rd of July 2025 the International Court of Justice gave its advisory opinion on the obligations of States in respect of climate change, and the fifteen judges spoke with one voice: the nations of the world have binding duties under international law to protect the climate system, for people living now and for the generations still to come.
The Court found that a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights, that States must act with due diligence to prevent significant harm to the climate, and that a breach of these duties can bring legal consequences. The words are measured, as the words of a court must be, and still they carry something the elders would recognise at once: that we are responsible for the world we hand on.
Para PachaMama watched this journey grow from the same islands where the Wānanga of Love first touched the ground, and today it feels as if the Pacific itself has spoken through the highest court on Earth. Fifteen years after the network shared the Rights of Mother Earth, the world’s own law is beginning to say that the Earth is not ours to break.
Now it is ours to keep, and that is the work of every Trustee for Planet Earth.
Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice, Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change, 23 July 2025. Read The World Asks the Court.